Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

sweet music to which many of them have been married, and the sweet voices we have heard sing them. Mrs. Wood gave a new lustre to the treble part of "Love's Young Dream." "Oft in the stilly night," has called forth the sweetest tones of the finest tenor; "The Soldier's Farewell" has been answered by many a heart. Peculiar circumstances have given reputation to some of the songs: as the history of the song, "She is far from the land where her young lover sleeps." There are, perhaps, ten really natural expressions of feeling in the collection of Melodies, but we doubt if more. The rest of the sentimental songs are sad stuff. The Orator Puff's are much better, and the "Two-penny Post Bag," a separate satirical poem, the best of all Moore's attempts.

Moore's Lalla Rookh is an instance of palpable failure. We know, nowhere, more elaborate, voluptuous description, and complicated, fanciful illustrations, so entirely thrown away as here, except in the versified form of the Epicurean, properly a rich, oriental prose poem, but, as translated into verse, a meaningless desert of poetical commonplaces.

The Anacreon of this author is not so good as Cowley's version; which proves that the very airiest poetry must have a basis of powerful sense, as the hardest marble takes the finest polish, and the loftiest pillars are crowned with the lightest chaplets of Corinthian grace. Ben Jonson, whose finest lyric, "Drink to me only with thine eyes," is continually ascribed to Moore, affords one instance among many others, of stern, rugged, vigorous sense, lightened and relieved by delicate and graceful fancy. The majestic old tragedians, Marlowe, Webster, and Shakspeare, and the rest, exhibited this refinement. But mere fancy, without vigor of understanding, fails to give momentum and passion to poetic flights. An excess of levity is visible in such poetry, which, on grave themes, is converted into as intolerable dullness.

The imitations of Moore are among the best tests of the real want of excellence in his poetry. His copyists are mawkish ballad-mongers, or else libertine philosophers, as they may affect real feeling, or a perfect indifference to it. These gentlemen substitute the French wines for Byron's gin, and if not as furious and terrible as the followers of Don Juan, are more light-hearted and skeptical.

There is an unhandsome notion lurking in the community, that the quantity of wine a poet can drink, and its effects upon him, exhibit the measure of his powers. Willis, himself, has lately fallen in with this absurdity, by which proof he attempts to make out Wordsworth to be a dull fellow, but Barry Cornwall a "glorious" poet. Proctor has certainly written some spirited songs, but the general tone of his poetry is feeble elegance, with occasional delicacy. The sentimental songs of this school may be generally classed with Pope's Song by a Person of Quality, and are filled with an equal number of senseless epithets, and inexpressive expressions.

The next generation will probably hear of Moore as a lively political wit, an accomplished diner-out, an agreeable companion at the summer fêtes of the great, in the country, and the admired of all admirers at the crowded routes of wealth and fashion in town. His songs will be sung-most of the good ones are now threadbare-until a new Haynes Bayly springs up, when he will be forgotten. His scholarship, being kept to himself, will be matter of tradition.

Lalla Rookh is now a dead letter; the History of Ireland is a dull book, though it may run an even race with Mr. Grattan's History of the Netherlands, which is another dull book. In a word, Moore's reputation is mostly personal, and will die with him, like that of the Sedleys and Kille

grews of a past age. Having written no such songs as Burns, like him he cannot live, nor emulate the fame of the truly great poets of this period, since his most elaborate attempt is a failure.

XXVI.

LITERARY PORTRAITS.

MACAULAY.

MACAULAY the Edinburgh reviewer, is, probably, the most brilliant writer of English prose now living, the last remaining member of that glorious band of wits, critics, and fine thinkers, who constituted the force of the Edinburgh in its primeJeffrey, Macintosh, Hazlitt, Brougham, Carlyle, Stephens, and himself; uniting also the fame of a successful politician to that of a splendid periodical writer, he has obtained an accumulation of honors rarely to be met in the person of a single individual. Review writing has now become an art, and one, too, in which very few succeed even respectably and in which innumerable failures occur quarterly. It is methodized into a system. It has its rules, and canons, and peculiar style. It must be exhaustive and thorough in its analysis; the writing must be neat and clean; the wit, bright and "palpable;" the logic, close and ingenious; the rhetoric, elaborate and dazzling. The style must never lag behind the story. There must be animation, at all events, even with error, (for the sake of piquancy,)

rather than dullness, however just and sincere. A flat review, however accurate and true, must fail; a true story does not answer the purpose of a lively reviewer, while a clever conjecture passes for more than an acknowledged truth, which wants the stimulus of novelty. This, surely, is not as it ought to be. Is it as we represent? You have only to read Macaulay to become satisfied as to the correctness of the criticism. Macaulay's reviews are the very Iliad and Odyssey of criticism-models of that kind of writing. Abler men and deeper scholars have written review articles yet without that mastery of the art. Hazlitt had a more copious fancy, a richer vein, and was altogether a more copious thinker and critic, yet his reviews lie buried under a mass of duller matter. We doubt whether Macaulay could have written the Surrey Lectures, but that is travelling out of the record. Macaulay's articles are not to be mistaken. It is like love at first sight, you may always know his hand. He wants, to be sure, the solidity of Burke, the rich philosophy of that poetic thinker; yet even Burke could not have hit the mark with greater nicety. He would have carried too much metal. Macaulay is essentially a critical essayist; not a mere critic, not an original judge, not a lecturer, but that rare union of critic and miscellaneous writer-a critical essayist. Probably, in no other form of composition could he have succeeded to such a degree of excellence. He could not compress himself into a monthly or weekly essayist. He wants, moreover, fineness and delicacy, for purely elegant writing. He paints on too broad a canvas, and aims too much at striking colors and at effects, to elaborate ingenious beauties, and perfect the almost perfect beauties of nature, in his style. Then, again, in a long work he would soon tirę : his genius would droop when he got beyond his hundred

pages. Pamphleteering would, perhaps, better suit Macaulay's genius than review writing, for he is a partizan in everything he writes. In his capacity of critic, he too often allows. his political bias to influence his judgment—the cabinet minister is sometimes a mere smart, ingenious paragraphist, by no means so intent on the truth as he should be. We remarked this particularly in two consecutive papers, the one on Southey's Colloquies, the other on Moore's Byron. The first writer is treated as a tory; the second as a whig. Contrast, also, the papers on Milton and on Boswell. Once understood, this partiality does no harm, but rather gives an edge to his style. History, no less than Letters, has been vividly illustrated by Macaulay, and many of his articles, in themselves, preserve the essence of books of great size but not equal value. Portrait painting and finished declamation. have been carried to perfection in his articles, in which we find, besides, a treasury of fine and ingenious thoughts, richly illustrated and admirably employed. He is so much, in a word, the opposite of Carlyle, that a characteristic sketch of the latter will not fail to include all the qualities opposed to his own, that we have omited in the above notice.

CARLYLE.

Thomas Carlyle is a name to be treated with respect, for, notwithstanding all his absurdity and pretension, he is undeniably so vigorous, and even sometimes so profound a writer, so sincere and genial a critic, and when warmed and in earnest, so powerful, that it would argue a deficiency, both of acuteness and candor, to deny his very great merits; at the same time, there is so much in the writer to excite a quite

« AnteriorContinuar »